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PROJECT ACTIVITIES

WP1: Research and work plan development

WP2: Review of the 4 capitals model as an applied model

WP3: Review of the social welfare and sustainable regional development objectives in the EU and new Member States

WP4: Review of tradeoffs and critical thresholds in the EU and new Member States

WP5: Review and testing of spatial planning tools

WP6: Testing of the deliberation matrix in selected policy and political contexts

WP7: Confirmation, recommendation and dissemination of tools for sustainable regional development

WP8: Project management

WP9: Peer Review

Case Studies (Relating directly to the work under WP3, 4, 5, 6)

The project will review key policy choices facing regional policy makers, the significance of the policy choice for sustainable regional development, and the use of evaluation methods to inform decisions.

The case studies will examine:
  • normative regional policy statements of the strategic policy goals of the region, describing desired regional outcomes that maximise or at least increase human well-being (technically – the most socially desirable combination of the different types of capital to increase social welfare now and in the future)
  • measurement using indicators of trends in the four capitals, tuned as far as possible to those trends that potentially give rise to significant trade-offs, and to where critical or minimum thresholds might exist below which substitution becomes unacceptable
  • identification of critical thresholds that provide some limit to the nature of the trade-offs, and which although traditionally defined in relation to environmental impacts might potentially relate to economic and social impacts
  • weighting and aggregation of different trends and policy impacts as the basis of appraisal, using as a first approximation the normative statement to infer the desired weighting, supported where necessary (where the normative statement does not give sufficiently detailed guidance) with reference to regional strategies
  • deliberative processes as part of the evaluation process and to address conflicts in values between stakeholders (which derive from different judgements about the nature of the impacts involved in a policy choice)
Case Study Regions
  • Czech Republic
  • Germany
  • Poland
  • Slovenia
  • Spain
  • United Kingdom